Until very recently my knowledge of London in the Victorian era was pretty much limited to what I learned in The Muppets Christmas Carol. My six-year old daughter, the expert on all things Victorian, has taken it upon herself to educate me properly. ‘Yes’, she acknowledges, ‘the Victorians did have the most excellent hats.’ She rolls her eyes when I ask whether they really had rats for book-keepers.

For many years in Belfast, no one spoke about the fact that we built one the largest ships in the world. The feat of engineering that was the Titanic had many innovative and groundbreaking features on board but not a word was uttered about it after it’s tragic sinking.Thankfully, those days of silence have long gone and now this part of our history